Robert F. McDonnell has so far had a shaky tenure as governor. His plans for offshore oil development sank with the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, he just can’t seem to remember there were slaves in Virginia and his much-touted erasure of the state’s $2 billion budget deficit was marred by smoke-and-…

It’s been quite a week so far Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s right-wing attorney general. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson, a Richmond jurist appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, allowed Cuccinelli’s lawsuit against the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare”, to go forward. Also on Monday, following a…

MORE ON THE WEALTH GAP and SWEEPING UP THE DUNG LEFT AFTER THE RICH-PERSON, POOR-PERSON POST OF 25 JULY. EMR was hoping that the RICH-PERSON, POOR-PERSON post of last Sunday (25 July) would generate substantive ideas on how to narrow the Wealth Gap. No such luck. There HAVE to be better answers than Dictator /…

Corey A. Stewart is playing “Whack -A-Mole.” Now that Susan Bolton, a federal judge in Arizona, has struck down the more noxious parts of that state’s racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant law, the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors has freshened up his version of the Copper State law for all of the…

Well, how about that. It appears that privately insured Americans are using fewer medical services these days. Patient visits, drug prescriptions and procedures were down in the second quarter of 2010 compared to year-ago levels, reports the Wall Street Journal. Weak demand could put downward pressure on spiraling health care costs and insurance premiums, the…

We Americans love to lock people up. As “The Economist” recently notes, the U.S. has an incarcerated population of 2.3 million, which is bigger than the entire population of individual 15 states. The rate of incarceration in the United Kingdom is one fifth of the U.S. a ninth what is is in Germany and a…

WaPo is full of good stuff today! Lets start with the front page of Business: Household Economics writer Michelle Singletary (The Color of Money) sketches out “What Sherrod was telling us” in a column with that subtitle. The money graf: There is a disturbing and widening gulf between the rich and the poor in America.…

Josh Dent is an early victim of Obamacare. The lanky, shaven-headed machine operator likes the medical insurance plan his employer, Acorn Sign Graphics, provides him. But under the newly enacted Affordable Care Act, his insurance policy will get less affordable. A provision in the law is putting his insurance company out of business, and whatever…

There’s been plenty of chatter on this site about ObamaCare and some of it seems cranked out by the right wing propaganda machine, as Larry Gross astutely calls it. Among the more shrill critiques is that it is not “free market” based, is way too expensive, adds to our dangerously booming debt and budget deficit,…

Senator Jim Webb has always been something of a maverick, but now he has done something truly shocking: He has broken from Democrat Party orthodoxy on the intertwined issues of race, diversity and white privilege. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece today, Webb makes it crystal clear that he is sympathetic to the condition…

This May, environmentalists hailed two developments that finally seemed to bode well for Chesapeake Bay. The Environmental Protection Agency settled a lawsuit with activist and seafood groups to start enforcing Bay pollution rules. Also, the Obama Administration announced it would undertake a pollution survey of Bay watersheds to identify and stem pollution. Unfortunately, the positive…

Let me start with a hypothetical. Imagine it’s 2002 and a white supremacist (skinhead) is videotaped on a public sidewalk. Let’s say the skinhead says, “I hate black people. All of them. Every last iota of a n*****, I hate them”. He goes on and on and eventually says something about killing black babies. Now,…

It’s the 50th Anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and there’s plenty being written about the novel, the author’s only one published. It has been one my favorite reads since either middle or high school (I can’t remember when I first read it) and I have reread it several times…

A 3.6 scale earthquake rocked the Nation’s Capital Friday morning, leading prominent conservatives to say that Barack Obama’s neo-socialist spending programs are affecting the earth’s tectonic plates. “The globe just can’t handle the trillions in upcoming debt that it is being weighed down with,” says James A. Bacon, noted aging Baby Boomer. Another prominent deficit…

Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pay for the dogma-saturated legal forays of Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia’s firebrand Attorney General. It’s a shame because hardly any of Cuccinelli’s high-profile legal actions seem to be worthy cases that protect citizens of the Old Dominion. Instead, his actions are aimed at firing up the hard-right…